Story
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things
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Overview
Qwen 3.8 27B is a vision-capable language model with 27 billion parameters, released under the Apache 2 license by Alibaba's Qwen research lab. Self-reported benchmarks indicate significant performance improvements over its predecessor, Qwen 3.6 27B.
Summary from simonwillison.net.
Reports
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Community reactions
Each reaction summarizes sampled comments from the linked discussion.
Hacker News · simonwillison.net
Hacker News discussion ↗
Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-08-17.
- Praise: The fact that a 17GB model can perform so well on consumer hardware is nothing short of miraculous — it's a game-changer for accessibility.
- Praise: Many users are thrilled with the coding performance of Qwen, even on mid-range setups, showing just how far local models have come.
- Praise: There's excitement about how Qwen's reasoning, while verbose, demonstrates the impressive amounts of hidden 'thinking' that contribute to its capabilities.
- Concern: The model's tendency to overthink is a major pain point, leading to unnecessary token usage and frustrating slowdowns in performance.
- Concern: Commenters are concerned that the verbose reasoning process can dilute the effectiveness of outputs, making it feel like the model is just going in circles.
- Concern: Comparisons with Muse 30B highlight Qwen's inefficiency, with users noting that it generates far too many reasoning tokens for simple tasks.